, Aileen," he said. "I don't know what to do about you
exactly. You oughtn't to go on this way. Whisky won't get you
anywhere. It will simply ruin your looks and make you miserable in the
bargain."

"Oh, to hell with my looks!" she snapped. "A lot of good they've done
me." And, feeling contentious and sad, she got up and left the table.
Cowperwood followed her after a time, only to see her dabbing at her
eyes and nose with powder. A half-filled glass of whisky and water was
on the dressing-table beside her. It gave him a strange feeling of
responsibility and helplessness.

Mingled with his anxiety as to Aileen were thoughts of the alternate
rise and fall of his hopes in connection with Berenice. She was such a
superior girl, developing so definitely as an individual. To his
satisfaction she had, on a few recent occasions when he had seen her,
unbent sufficiently to talk to him in a friendly and even intimate way,
for she was by no means hoity-toity, but a thinking, reasoning being of
the profoundest intellectual, or, rather, the highest artistic
tendencies. She was so care-free, living in a high and solitary world,
at times apparently enwrapt in thoughts serene, at other times sharing
vividly in the current interests of the social world of which she was a
part, and which she dignified as much as it dignified her.

One Sunday morning at Pocono, in late June weather, when he had come
East to rest for a few days, and all was still and airy on the high
ground which the Carter cottage occupied, Berenice came out on the
veranda where Cowperwood was sitting, reading a fiscal report of one of
his companies and meditating on his affairs. By now they had become
somewhat more sympatica than formerly, and Berenice had an easy, genial
way in his presence. She liked him, rather. With an indescribable
smile which wrinkled her nose and eyes, and played about the corners of
her mouth, she said: "Now I am going to catch a bird."

"A what?" asked Cowperwood, looking up and pretending he had not heard,
though he had. He was all eyes for any movement of hers. She was
dressed in a flouncy morning gown eminently suitable for the world in
which she was moving.

"A bird," she replied, with an airy toss of her head. "This is
June-time, and the sparrows are teaching their young to fly."

Cowperwood, previously engrossed in financial speculations, was
translated, as by the wave of a fairy wand, into another realm where
birds a